#oneaday Day 964: QCF+P

After lengthy consideration (all right, a little bit of Googling) I decided to invest in a fight pad for the PS4. I was tempted to get an adapter for my arcade stick, but looking into it there's the possibility that some of the things might not quite map properly if going that route, and I want to ensure compatibility.

So I've picked up a… what is it called (checks) Razer Raion, which is supposedly very nice. Zavvi had it for half its normal price (it's normally a hundred quid, which is a lot more than I'm willing to spend on a joypad) as well as providing options to pay it off over several months with no interest, so that was a bit of a no-brainer really. It should arrive in the next couple of days; I'm looking forward to trying it.

And I'm genuinely looking forward to giving these Neo Geo fighters a proper go. It's been a very long time since I played a fighting game with any degree of seriousness — the last was probably Dead or Alive 4 — so it's going to be interesting to explore these, particularly as I've never tried SNK fighters other than SNK Heroines (which I love) before. I am definitely 100% all about the pixel art in these games — and I'm pleased to see that despite these PS4 games actually being ports/emulations of PS2 titles, they're a lot less blurry than the otherwise excellent ADK Damashi collection, so that will really allow them to shine.

On that note, having a decent fight pad will actually allow me to play some of the games in ADK Damashi that I haven't really tried before, too.

Anyway, the Razer thingy looks nice because it has an 8-way D-pad, which I'm hoping will help with my general incompetence at performing fireball and Dragon Punch motions. It also has big chunky buttons, which is exactly what you want from a controller like this, and I believe it has programmable elements, too. As I say, looking forward to trying it.

I'm also looking forward to these fighters for another reason — as Guilty Gear Strive announces yet more DLC not long after it's launched, I'm really keen to play a fighting game that is complete right from the moment you actually pick it up and start playing. Art of Fighting has, I think, 8 fighters in it, only two of whom are playable in Story Mode. That is 1) much less overwhelming than the three billion characters modern fighters have and 2) never going to try and charge me more money for more characters while I'm playing.

The explosion of DLC for fighting games is really offputting these days. It makes me not want to jump into any new ones, because you know that purchasing the game isn't the end of your expenditure — not if you want the "complete" experience, anyway. I genuinely actually preferred it when Capcom did several versions of the same game — at least that way, people could specialise in a particular version of the game rather than this piecemeal nonsense we have these days.

But that's a rant about something that's not particularly relevant to me, because modern fighting games feel completely out of reach for my skill levels right now. I suspect at least some of these SNK titles may also be out of reach for me — but I'm willing to give them a go now I've got them, and I suspect trying them out may make for some interesting article fodder, too.